Schema.org - Support in the CMS Landscape

In our recent blog post we discussed three extensions that provide tools for semantic annotation in TYPO3. Enriching your website with semantic markup enables you to describe the meaning of a web page for search engines. Search engines use this information to gain a better understanding of the web page's meaning and to create "rich snippets" in search results. Schema.org is sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex and is a common vocabulary for semantic annotations.

In this post, we take a look at WordPress and Drupal and look like how does schema.org support look like in this content management systems.

Wordpress

Let's start off with WordPress: Similar to TYPO3, WordPress offers an extension repository, called Plugin Directory. There you can find some extensions that will add schema.org support to the WordPress system.

Schema Plugin

With the Schema Plugin, you can maintain schema.org attributes within the blog post’s meta area.

Create post meta fields with Post Meta Box generator feature.

WPSSO Schema JSON-LD

The WPSSO Schema JSON-LD plugin will add Schema JSON-LD markup for common types (Article, Event, Local Business, Product, Recipe and Review). The focus of this plugin is social media optimization.

A selection of Google Structured Data / Schema Markup options is shown based on the Schema Item Type. This example shows the Schema Item Type.

Drupal

Drupal is an official partner of schema.org. In Drupal 7 there was an extension for Schema.org support. In version 8, Drupal’s RDF mappings were extended by schema.org definition. The module can be used to map the attributes of content elements to schema.org attributes.

Drupal RDF UI Module in Drupal 8

Conclusion

In Wordpress, there are numerous extensions that provide a schema.org support. Most are limited to the "common" types (e.g. organization, person, etc.).

The schema.org website lists drupal as an official partner. Since Version 8, schema.org is a core feature.

TYPO3 would also benefit from a partnership with schema.org. The mapping of schema.org attributes to content elements in Drupal also seems like a viable way and would correspond to the JSON-LD2TCA in the TYPO3 world.

P.S.: If you know further extensions for semantic annotations in WordPress or Drupal, please feel free to tell us in a comment about it. And if you have questions related to schema.org, feel free to get in touch with us.

Comments

Andreas Kramers

October 31st, 2017

Hello Arthur,
Nice Post.
IF I understand your post correctly, Typo3 does not have some kind of plugin for structured data. Which I find pretty sad, since I've com to know Typo3 as a very stable and well coded CMS. Unfortunaltely, I only work with WP.
Right now, I have a customer who has a Typo3 Site which I want to optimize with some Schema Markup.
I've even managed to do this with Wix CMS, and it works fine, although it's a real pain to create all the JSON LD Scripts and insert them in the site using a html box.
But I can imagine this is possible with Typo3 too by using the text editor and inserting the code manually.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to test this yet since I do not have Access to client site (yet).

I've seen big ranking improvements on client sites, after using some more advanced schema markup. Advanced means : More than these Plugins create automatically, but even these simple markups bring nice results...